Our 5th Anniversary Special Feature is a collection of six articles (plus an Editorial from Executive Editor Rob Freckleton) that highlights the breadth and depth of topics covered by the journal so far. It grew out of our 5th Anniversary Symposium – a joint event held in London, UK and Calgary, Canada and live-streamed around the world in April 2015 – and contains papers by Associate Editors, a former Robert May prize winner and regular contributors to the journal.

The six articles are based on talks given at last May’s Symposium. They focus on:

In his Editorial for the Special Feature, Rob Freckleton looks to the future. In his words: “we hope to continue to publish a wide range of papers on as diverse a range of topics as possible, exemplified by the diversity of the papers in this feature”.

– boral: An R package for model-based analysis of multivariate abundance data, with estimation performed using Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. A key feature of the boral package is the ability to incorporate latent variables as a parsimonious method of modelling between species correlation.

– phyndr and taxonlookup: Two R packages that allow users to implement a new set of algorithms that use topological and taxonomic information to make publicly available phylogenetic data sets with missing species more useful.

The last freely available article in this month’s issue is an Open Access paper by Matthew Breece et al. The authors introduce a new method of using satellite images and seascapes to track endangered species. They hope that this may enable seascapes to be used as a daily decision tool by industry and managers to reduce interactions with this imperilled species during coastal migrations.

This issue’s cover image depicts the ‘Eye of the Sahara’, Mauritania. It illustrates the geologically unique nature of desert environments, and showcases openly-accessible satellite remote sensing (SRS) datasets for use in their monitoring. In the related article, How do we want Satellite Remote Sensing to support biodiversity conservation globally? (which is part of the Special Feature), Pettorelli et al. identify and process multiple SRS-derived biodiversity-relevant variables across the Sahara. They then examine the relative applicability of these existing freely-available SRS-derived to inform the aims of existing biodiversity monitoring frameworks.